All Scholars

Jules Marouzeau grew up on a farm in a heavily agricultural area of central France but with scholarships he was able to attend the recently established Lycée Lakanal, a preparatory school in the countryside sear Paris (Sceaux), where he met other academically gifted students and developed his knowledge of Latin. Later, at the Sorbonne, he was drawn to the analytic philology of the Latin language by the linguist Antoine Meillet (1866-1936) and the philologist Louis Havet (1849-1925). Under Meillet’s tutelage he gained interest in Latin stylistics which became his philological (as opposed to his bibliographical) specialty. Marouzeau became treasurer of the Société de linguistique de Paris in 1908. His particular topic in his numerous contributions to RPh and REL over a span of 50 years was Latin word order, particularly the innovations made by the great poets, Horace and Virgil chiefly, to elevate the language beyond its prosaic levels. His Traité de stylistique latine and his collected essays L’Ordre des mots dans la phrase latine in 3 vols. (1922-49; supplement in 1953) preceded his master work on Latin stylistics, Quelques aspects de la formation du latin litteraire in 1949.

         Marouzeau’s other influence in Paris, Havet, likely led him to bibliography and helped him secure his early jobs (Hilbold, 176) after he left secondary-school teaching. Recognizing that the rush of scholarship that occurred in the latter 19^th century had established the need for comprehensive compilations in scientific bibliographies, he began bibliographic work for RPh before World War I, and founded the journal Revue des comptes rendus d’ouvrages relatifs à l’Antiquité Classique in 1911 (He would later merge it with Revue de philologie following the death of its editor, Adrien Krebs, in 1923.).

          Marouzeau was drafted into service in World War I, was captured by the Germans, was released in 1919, and spent the next year recovering his health. Among the effects of the war’s end were a fresh assertion of national identity and, prompted by the allied effort to win the war, a sense of international cooperation. The Bibliotheca Philologica Classica contained in each year’s Bursian’s Jahresbericht gave insufficient attention to work done elsewhere in Europe and in America. Moreover, it simply listed titles. Bibliography became a focus of the League of Nations and the International Institute on Intellectual Cooperation (CICI). Securely positioned in Paris, Marouzeau founded the Société de Bibliographie Classique (SBC) in 1921 to reorganize the categories of Revue bibliographies for a new publication. In 1922 he received further financial support from the Conféderation des Sociétés Scientifiques Françaises and the CICI, which ranked classical philology, along with physics and chemistry, as a top bibliographical priority.  Well before the war, Marouzeau had assiduously cultivated international contacts whom he encouraged to submit national or regional bibliographies each year to the office in Paris where he would singlehandedly compile them. His twin commitment to bibliography and philology is manifest in his founding in March 1923 of the Société des études latines which would publish REL and a series of philological monographs, Collection d’études latines (At the time of Marouzeau’s death the collection numbered 36 volumes.). He continued to serve as president of the SEL until 1963 at the age of 84. He began work on a bibliography that had not been compiled in the war years and after, Dix Années de bibliographie Classique (1914-1924). Since Marouzeau alone compiled all of the entries and provided summaries of the significant publications, the volumes became familiarly known simply as “Marouzeau” as did his subsequent project, L’Année philologique. (For further details on the founding of APh, see Hilbold). Dix Années received international acclaim and Marouzeau’s yearly bibliographies in RPh in addition to his frequent philological contributions were so well-regarded that when the editorship became vacant in 1926, he felt the position should be his. Instead, the syntactician Alfred Ernout (1879-1973) was named editor and Marouzeau founded L’Année philologique the same year with financial support from the SBC. His arrangement of the citations into ten categories lasted until 1996. Fortunately, he had a student named Juliette Ernst (1900-2001) who gradually assumed the bulk of the work. She is first acknowledged in the preface to volume 3 (1928) and from the next year relieved Marouzeau of much of the work and continued to run the publication until 1990, freeing Marouzeau to continue his stylistic work in Latin, and later in French. He translated Terence for the Budé series and proselytized students on the benefits of learning Latin, with his publications Le latin and Introduction au latin.